Practising medicine in the global village: use of guidelines and virtual networks

The author discusses the use of virtual networks and guidelines in migration medicine. She states that the immigrant-specific, evidence-based clinical guidelines were lacking and the Clinical Preventive Care Recommendations for Newly Arriving Immigrants and Refugees to Canada are significant to the world literature on migration medicine. She relates that the refugee camp disease surveys and outbreaks of disease prevalence could be used to guide real-time recommendations for empiric treatment.

The article offers information on evidence-based clinical guidelines for refugees and immigrants in Canada. It mentions that the Canadian Collaboration for Immigrant and Refugee Health explicitly uses an evidence-based clinical preventive approach to improve patients' health. It adds that...

The author discusses the end of the evidence-based medicine (EBM) with few pointers including the absence of EBM training, the proliferation of opinion-based special groups and the dearth of guidelines on EBM.

The article discusses the evidence on treatment for autism spectrum disorders. It informs about the voting on statements for several treatment procedures by team of health experts which included treatments that involved psychosocial factors, augmentative communication systems and auditory...

The article provides information on several recommendations included in a set of evidence-based guidelines on palliative care published by the American College of Physicians in the U.S. The recommended interventions include regular screening of patients with serious illness for pain, dyspnea and...

The number of available clinical practice guidelines has grown enormously in the recent years, therefore requiring a correct approach and use of them. We present a revision of what guidelines are and serve, how to correctly develop and find them, and how to develop and evaluate them through...

The article deals with the evidence-based guideline on the management of invasive meningococcal disease published by the Scottish Intercollegiate Guidelines Network (SIGN) in May 2008. Areas covered include assessment, diagnosis and treatment from initial presentation, secondary prevention and...

Background It is not known whether there are differences in the quality and recommendations between evidence-based (EB) and consensus-based (CB) guidelines. We used breast cancer guidelines as a case study to assess for these differences. Methods Five different instruments to evaluate the...

The author explains a change in focus for the New Zealand Guidelines Group from creating New Zealand-based guidelines to adapting and setting up the best of what is available from abroad. He says that the group aims to promote and support the use of reliable evidence in the country's healthcare....